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INTRODUCTION

“Ma ra-a hul mu 'minuna hasananFa huwa ‘indallahi hasanun”

“What the faithful believers find good,is [presumably] good on the side of God.”

(Hadith transmitted by Ahmad).

This Chapter deals with the ritual practice of adatwhich is nearly the same thing as what Rippin called the “additional ritual”, the ritualoutside the enactment of the Five-pillars, used by the Muslims to express their identity. Itthus, lies outside the domain of ibadat in the narrowersense. Some of the adat activities are undeniably Muslimcreations, some others have unclear origins but all of these practices have an Islamicflavour.

Other activities refer to indigenous ceremonies which are likely to have anon-Islamic origin but are tolerated or retained because they have been Islamised in that theyhave undergone modification from their original form. Their existence in their present form isharmless to the Islamic faith or has even been incorporated into it and is used as anexpression of particular local Muslim identity.

Among adatrituals belonging to the first type are commemorations of the Islamic holy days; thosebelonging to the second are thanksgivings (syukuran ortasyakuran) and slametan related to the individual life cycle and the commemoration of the deathof a person. Examples of those belonging to the third are the communal feasts related to theagricultural season.

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THE NATURE OF ADAT

Before going further into a description of adat ritualsin Cirebon, it is worthwhile to take a brief look at the nature of adat and how they relate to the Cirebonese context. This is important becausethe relation between adat and Islam is an interestingsubject of analytical discourse.

The word adat is derived from Arabic ‘adat (plural form of ‘adah) meaningcustom, or habit and is considered as synonymous with ‘urf,something which is commonly known or accepted. It generally refers to the result oflong-standing convention, either deliberately adopted or the result of unconscious adaptationto circumstances, that has been followed where practical considerations have beenuppermost.[1]

By this definition, even an animal is said to have its own adat.[2] The early Sunni scholars considered some ‘urf asthe roots of the fiqh, but in Wahhabi Arabia, ‘urf, if contrary to the rigid code held by the rulers, is stigmatisedas a taghut, the mistaken conduct of the ungodly Jahiliya way.[3] Since the nineteenth century, especially due to the influence of Van Vollenhoven,ter Haar and Snouck Hurgronje adat has been used bycolonial government in Indonesia as a legal term designating a prescriptive right, which wasgiven currency as an independent legal entity apart from the canon law of Islam (syari'ah).[4] Local adat was encoded into units of juralmanagement, whereby legal pluralism in colonial Indonesia was introduced.[5]

Under this scheme, based on a classification of adat systems as cultural geographic units, the Dutch divided Indonesiainto at least nineteen adat law areas.[6] So called adat law rather than syari'ah, was then imposed wherever possible in an attempt todivorce the indigenous people from Islam. Adat law,however, was applied inconsistently as at the same time, under the 1854 Constitution (article75, para 3), the application of adat rules which were inconflict with generally recognised principles of justice in European terms was strictlyforbidden.[7]

Meanwhile, the ensuing discourse on South-East Asian Muslim societies concerning therelation between Islam and adat has become unclear.Adat is sometimes described as either mingling,suggesting an unstructured mixing, or as conflicting, suggesting the reification and existenceof two separate bodies of knowledge and practice. Either view, according to Ellen, is aprofoundly misleading over-simplification.[8]

In Cirebon, the word adat is generally used preciselyto refer to custom, habit or any form of ordinary behaviour commonly adhered to by many people(barang apa bae kang wis biasa dilakoni deng wong akeh).To illustrate this meaning, the following expressions may be helpful:

Different places have different adat (customs); theadat of people here is like this, whereas theadat of people over there is like that.[9]

It is the people's adat (customs) here to wearsarung and topong at prayer.[10]

Commenting to someone who complains about the demanding and frequentcrying child, one says:

It is its adat (nature) if a child likes crying (so do not complain nor be startled).[11]

Many other examples can be put forward but the point is that adat, from the Cirebonese perspective, is no more than custom. While like in otherparts of Java there is no such a thing as desa adat,neither is there an adat official, nor is there, at leastin contemporary Cirebon, any jural implication of such so-called adat. Rather, adat is conceived as a naturalphenomenon whose occurrence commonly and inherently contributes to human conduct, to the wayof doing things such as religious duties or social behaviour. Some adat may be genuinely of local creation while other adat may be of foreign origin. Some is ritualised and other adat is loosely technical. Most people are hardly aware of whenadat came into being or where it came from.

From theirreligious view point, some adat is good and other adat is bad; some matches precisely with the syari'ah set forth in fiqh,other adat matches the ethical spirit emanating from Islam.Still other adat just parallels Islam, while some otheradat may stand in opposition to Islam. The sepikulan-segendongan principle in the Javanese rules ofinheritance whereby a male sibling gets twice that of a female is an example of adat belonging to the first.[12]

Many forms of feasts may be the example of the second, the use of local clothingto cover ‘awrat at prayer is an example for the third,whereas such activities as cock-fighting, betting and gambling at the lebaran festival are examples of the fourth. Given that adat may either be good or bad, its treatment, whether one wishes to keep it oravoid it, is subject to an individual's own ethical consideration be they ofIslamic, Christian, or any other origin.

The quotation from the hadith at the begining of thisChapter comes from Pak Soleh (44 years), the thoughtful trader already acknowledged in thepreceding chapter, the one who enunciated the broader and narrower meaning of ibadat.[13]

He claimed that the hadith is one of thescriptural bases that guides him whether to accept or reject certain adat. In relation to a number of ritual and ceremonial activities belonging toadat, it is the true believers, represented by ulama and pious figures, who attest to a practice's Islamicvalidity. He asserted, that such activities as the commemoration of Islamic holy days and manyforms of slametan have gained support from, and have becomepart of the favourable work of many ulama, pious figuresand kyai. It is enough to say that these activities,according to Pak Soleh, have become good Muslims’ adat(wis dadi adate wong Islam kang bagus) and have a certainIslamic significance. It is thus, unnecessary and, sometimes even difficult, to set a clearboundary between adat and syari'ah. To clarify the relationship between the two, Pak Soleh gave thefollowing illustration:

The case of adat and syari'ah is just like doing prayer and wearing sarung and topong. Prayer belongs tosyari'ah, wearing sarung and topong belong to Javaneseadat. How then, should they be separated? It is true that doing prayer is valid without wearing sarung andtopong provided the awrat is covered. But clearly, doing prayer and wearing sarung and topong are united, they are not opposed to syari'ah; rather, in our taste, it even looks better as it indicates more humbleness to God.[14]

Pak Soleh's approach to adat vis-a-vis syari'ah undeniably represents the position of many traditionalistMuslim villagers. Unfortunately, this position stands against the main stream of Indologie scholarship put forward by Snouck Hurgronje and otherswho, under the guise of scholarship, exploited adat andIslam as a means to enable the colonial government to exercise easier political control. Indealing with Islam in South-East Asia, Hurgronje and others have successfully enjoyed esteemfor arguing for the necessary separation and opposition between adat and syari'ah (Islam).[15] Virtually, the reliability of this colonial scholarship is now under siege fromthe current trend of more objective research.

Based on a strong denial of the significance of Islam in Dutch colonial policy and in theinterest of preventing the emergence of a national integrity in the colonial state, ethnicdivisions were fostered. In the meantime, the European colonial cultures, especially Britishand Dutch, misunderstood and distorted Islam from the very start when they made systematicdescriptions of it. Ironically, it is this confusion and distortion which provided theframework for the scholarship of Islam in South-East Asia that followed.[16]

Leaving aside this issue for a while, it might be useful to echo Hooker's assertion thatIslam, being the youngest of the world's monotheistic religions, in its own view, is intendedto complete the great Judeo-Christian traditions. Also in its own view, Islam prescribes acomplete scheme for the temporal and spiritual worlds and thereby it does not separatereligion from daily life, something that the secular West can hardly comprehend.[17]

Yet, to understand the local manifestations of great traditions such as Islam, itis not enough to simply focus on ethnographic particularities alone, especially theethnography of colonial vintage which, according to Ellen, has failed to make valuablecontribution in analysing Muslim belief and practice other than as a part of a culturalassemblage.[18]

It is true, as Ellen holds, that an initial recognition of distinctive Muslimculture within the totality of Islamic tradition is a prerequisite before one starts tograpple with an understanding of the local expression of the Islamic faith. Muslims all overthe world live within diverse cultural niches whose expressions of identity bear the colour oftheir diversity, one of which is in the form of various adat. With these convictions, I shall start my discussions of adat to include the following items.